Recently, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) has granted funding for the development of an automated information retrieval system for preclinical and clinical published data on spinal cord injury (SCI) treatments. A consortium of researchers in the fields of (a) spinal cord injury of the Center for Neuronal Regeneration (CNR) and the University Düsseldorf, (b) semantic computing of the CITEC excellence cluster at the Bielefeld University, (c) natural language processing at Stuttgart University and (d) applied statistics University Düsseldorf together with experts on the planning and monitoring of clinical trials of the Coordination Center for Clinical Trials of the University Clinics of Düsseldorf established the project PSINK (Preclinical Spinal Cord Injury Knowledge Base, http://www.psink.de) in 2016.

The aim of this project is to set up an interactive information system which supports more effective translation of preclinical results in SCI research into clinical trials. For this, a system is developed which automatically processes large amounts of unstructured textual data describing outcomes of preclinical experiments and clinical trials. The resulting novel SCI knowledge base will increase the quality of SCI research and lay ground for the objective assessment of the prospective success of clinical translation of an experimental therapy, thus saving time and resources for the benefit of the patient.

Because this is a novel approach, we require the feedback of potential users. By completing this questionnaire you can provide a valuable contribution to the quality and usability of the knowledge base.